Displacement

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The loss of humor

The distinguishing mark of senility in a thinker is the eagerness with which he is ready to embrace a religious or a moral or an altruistic way of life or thinking mostly as an antidote to his own growing disgruntlement, assuming he has not already announced himself to be a god. This happens to even the mightiest of thinkers. In his youthful days, however, he had not adopted significantly different philosophies or ways of lives. Even then he had acted as a god, an atheist, a savior and a destroyer. But he assumed these roles very flexibly. He got in and out of them very easily. He could do so because he is still able to laugh at the fact that he does not have to, or he cannot even if he wanted to, define himself, or 'be' anything, that his life lacks a unitary meaning. He is cheerful about the abyss. The senile thinker has lost this sense of humor.

Life and Expression

His life has a deep internal logic -- a consequence of him having surveyed and soared over the entirety of being. And the profundity of this experience is buried inside him, although alive, bringing him to the verge of a threshold. All he needs, he deems, is an expression of this experience, whether as a deed or a journey, a piece of writing or a touchdown. This expression would then complete and round up what has already achieved an internal completion, by externalizing this experience, and thus bringing the external world up to speed. He adds up his life and the expression to envision a totality. And so as he expresses himself, he proclaims that the threshold has been crossed over. The temperature increases, there is a 'quickening of the faculties', a gasping of breath, as if life itself is nearing its end -- expression as eschathology!
But then when the summit has been reached, and he screams out in jubilation, all he hears is his own hollow echo. What has happened? What has gone wrong? He looks around and about, and he denies the echo. Has the world not reached a conclusion? Is his logic faulty? But then he learns that he has to go on. Life has not ended. Maybe it has given birth to something through him, but it lives on. He sees this when he recognizes that not all of the experiences that constitutes his inner being were ready for expression. Sure, they know the lines but they are still unwilling to come onto the stage. So the expression cannot be just added to the entirety of his being, as the last unit of the latter, but rather it is the other side of his internal experience, which is invoked only when its time arrives and not before that. The division of the internal and the external world is illusory at best. And so he marches on with life, recognizing that by expressing himself he has gained life, and not exhausted it. The totality needs to be repeated on a different sphere now.

Reason in madness

Even the artist drives those objects away from his immediate world, whose greatness he can recognize only from a distance, be it spatial or temporal. He retains only those select few objects around him, which he can consecrate and still not lose his breath or sanity.
The artist does not only utilize his tools for the purpose of creation, but also for his preservation. But through the objects he creates, he intends to confront what he had previously driven away into oblivion. That is, his creations come from a distance, they are precisely the conveyors of distance, and in that sense not his objects at all.